


Five Things That Never Happened To Daniel Jackson

by Todesengel



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, M/M, Noncanonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-15
Updated: 2011-08-15
Packaged: 2017-10-22 16:02:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Todesengel/pseuds/Todesengel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Daniel's life might have changed</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The box manages to bounce once as it exits the 'gate, before coming to a crumpled halt. Daniel stares at it as if it were a mirage and then picks it up, and he knows without thinking about how he knows, that this is a message from Jack. What he doesn't know is why and it's just enough of a question to make him pause, just interesting enough to make him wonder, 'What's going on?' because only Jack would send him a box of Kleenex, and that meant that Jack had told them all that he was alive. And there had to be a good reason why Jack did that, and Daniel could never leave 'why' questions alone.

"What will you do, Danyel?" Sha're's arms were soft around his waist, and steel beneath the satin of her skin.

"Nothing," he says, and drops the box, and thinks nothing of it. Later, when he's bleeding out and still hearing Sha're screaming for him, her cries echoing in her head like the had off the stone walls, it catches his eye and he wonders if maybe this was what Jack had meant. If it had been a warning of some kind.

 _Some fucking warning_ he thinks as he dies.


	2. Chapter 2

It happened after the encounter with Nem. At first it was just little things -- he started forgetting where he put his keys a bit more frequently, couldn't remember what he'd done the night before, conversations that he'd just heard. Little things that could be explained away because he'd always been a bit forgetful, mind flashing from one subject to the next and stewing on a third.

Then the problem became a little larger. Days went missing. Words. Chunks of grammar like how to use the ablative in Latin for anything other than means and preposition. Facts that he knew so deeply he'd never questioned their presence in his mind until they were gone -- his height, his weight, his social security number.

And then, one day, as he sat in the infirmary between the tests Janet was running because she couldn't think of anything else to do, he looked up and saw a stranger staring at him with bone-deep pain in his eyes, and Daniel almost asked, "Who are you?" before he remembered that this was _Jack_.

"I'm sorry," he said then, around the fear and the tears that he didn't want to cry.

"It'll be all right," Jack lied. His hand was clumsy as it rested on Daniel's shoulder, awkwardly patting him. "It'll be fine."


	3. Chapter 3

"Let me go, Jack," he says, asking first, smiling, so ready to move on, to go. To leave. "Make Jacob stop."

But Jack can't, and the smile on Daniel's face rapidly fades, and his expression becomes slightly hard, and then panicked, and then angry as he wheedles and begs and finally pleads with Jack to _do_ something. To act. To reach out his hand and knock away the healing device Jacob is running over his body.

"God, Jack, it hurts," he says towards the end, in a soft, desperate moan. "Please. Please, make it stop." He cries out and convulses and Jack wishes he were a bigger man. Wishes he wasn't afraid of the deep, aching wound that would be caused by Daniel's absence.

"I can't," he says, softly.

"You bastard." The words are soft, but full of hate that drips like poison and bile.

Daniel doesn't say anything after that. Not in the strange other-world they're in, not when Jack's thrust back into reality and Jacob is stepping away, and Fraiser's looking carefully optimistic, but talking about things like rehab and lasting effects and permanent damage.

It doesn't matter to Jack.

Daniel is alive.

They sort the rest out later.


	4. Chapter 4

Daniel never manages to remember everything.

Oh he can still speak every language he ever learned, and if he lets his body act on its own, he can duck and weave like Jack and Sam and Teal'c. And he does remember some things. Like dying.

He remembers dying very vividly. And dying not once but several times, although the last one was the most painful. And he remembers loss. Sha're. His parents. Abydos. He remembers being crazy, being a ghost, being beaten, being helpless. He remembers his fears, and he remembers his crushed dreams, and he remembers all the times he failed.

He doesn't really remember anything else, and that's how he knows that this is punishment. Because for all that he's told that the strongest memories are the most traumatic ones, he still thinks he should be able to remember...something else. Going to school. Getting into college. The thrill he knows he must have felt the first time he stepped through the 'gate. The happiness of his marriage, brief though it was.

But his life is empty except for the things that make him twist and curl inside and die just a little bit more every day. Empty except for his nightmares, and the false memories he built of the rest of his life.

It's a good thing he was exactingly detailed, before. A written record of his life stretching back to a time when his words were a mélange of English and Arabic and French. Detailed enough so that he can fake it and only get those looks from Jack every once and a while, the ones that make him squirm on the inside and wonder if maybe there was something that he never committed to paper. Something important. Something vital.

He reads his journals over and over, until he can almost picture the life that's being written in his head, like an old home movie -- jerky, faded pictures with no sound.

It's not quite like a real life, but Daniel supposes that it'll have to do.


	5. Chapter 5

Daniel closes his book, place marked with a twenty he was going to use to buy lunch with before he got distracted. He puts his glasses on the book. Turns off the light. Jack is warm beside him, and apparently not quite asleep because he rolls over and throws a possessive arm across Daniel's chest and sighs, just once.

Daniel falls asleep to the sound of Jack breathing in his ear and wakes up to the muffled noise of the television and the distinct feeling of absence at his side. He stumbles out of bed and into the doorway and down the hall where Jack is sitting on the couch and watching CNN because he's old and can't sleep some nights. Daniel sits down beside him, then slouches, and finally slumps until he's mostly in Jack's lap, and that's a comfortable place to be, and he's not awake at all.

"Go back to bed," Jack whispers, and his fingers feel like the night breeze in the desert as they stroke Daniel's hair.

"Come with me," he yawns, even as he's thinking that this is a pretty good place to sleep and lord knows he's had worse.

Jack laughs at him, softly, and Daniel falls asleep to the sound of the latest update on Kinsey's resignation.

In the morning, he opens his eyes to a muted ESPN, and he's covered by a blanket and there's his glasses and coffee waiting for him on the table.

Over breakfast he gets into an argument with Jack about whether or not cavemen could beat astronauts in a fight, of all things, and they snipe at each other during lunch about whether or not they're going to P3S-225 since there are only, as Jack says, a bunch of broken stones, and when Jack hauls him out of the mountain at sometime well after the rest of the world has gone home, leaving his briefing half-written, cut off in the middle of a word, he goes along without a protest because Jack has promised him steak.

Jack grills, and Daniel eats, and when they kiss it tastes like the apple wood Jack used to smoke the meat. There's passion fruit sorbet sitting in the freezer and Daniel licks away the sweet, sticky spots on Jack's arms where it melted because they'd forgotten about it, momentarily.

Kisses and passion fruit sorbet and it's a different book tonight but the same forgotten twenty. Jack beside him, and a mission tomorrow, and when Daniel closes his eyes he doesn't question the fact that he's happy.


End file.
